THE ROLE OF INTONATION IN EMPHASIZING OF SEMANTICALLY IMPORTANT SPEECH UNITS (ON THE SAMPLES FROM MODERN ENGLISH FILM DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article is a contribution to defining intonation means that emphasize semantically important speech units. To meet the aim identified above, data has been selected from film discourse which is seen as a verbal film component combined with its audiovisual line and other relevant extralinguistic factors. Film dialogue as a component of film discourse is a structural linear pattern, which is strictly determined, stable, time-ordered, characteristic of verbal and visual components and predictable. Intonation-prosodic arrangement of a dialogue is determined by its pragmatic intention, as well as peculiarities of compositional and logico-semantic structure. The analysis of the combination of pre-nuclear and nuclear components allows to identify certain typical melodic patterns marking semantically important pieces of information. The former have been defined as the combination of high level head with high falling or falling-rising tone, which is typical for most sense groups of the theme. As for the logical arrangement, this pattern expresses the sequence of actions, cause and effect relationship, it initiates a new topic and attracts the listener’s attention. Stable perceptive emphasis is gained by discourse components framed by the combination of descending, scandent, sliding, or broken descending heads with high or mid falling tones. Intonation emphasis of the sense groups manifesting the rheme is also performed by descending or falling heads. They highlight those parts of sense groups which are important for the rheme realization and frame conclusions, arguments, causeeffect relations. Descending heads often start a new discourse microtopic, creating certain rhythm for the highlighted phrases. The carried out instrumental analysis of emphatic communicative means has been helpful to prove that the emphasis of the most semantically important speech fragments is manifested by raising the pitch, widening the speech range, increasing the intensity, quickening the speech tempo, using meaningful pauses in front of semantically important word units.